Why we build Orchestra
Modern work changes fast. Modern work in the Tech changes even faster.
Over the past decade, there has been a significant shift in work dynamics. Just ten years ago, the majority of small and large companies operated from traditional office spaces, relying on whiteboards, meeting rooms, and notebooks for collaboration. I bet you even remember the times when stickers were used to create Kanbans on the whiteboard.
Today, we are witnessing one of the most significant shifts in the way work is conducted since the emergence of the internet and email, - more and more companies adopt hybrid work, and lots of small and medium teams are going fully remote. Lots of great companies like Linear, Zapier, and GitLab are fully remote from day one. The work becomes distributed.
This process can no longer be stopped, and it’s fascinating. But there is a problem - there is a lack of good tools for remote work. Almost every tool for team collaboration we have is made by office teams for office teams.
We believe it’s wrong. Modern work needs tools created by the distributed teams for the distributed work.
That’s why we are building Orchestra.
More than 60% of modern teams experience problems with collaboration
We’ve talked to dozens of teams and found out two main problems they faced in their remote collaboration:
- Communication
- Task management
Communication. In times of office work, most of the communication was offline: all the teammates worked around you, and you could discuss any question with everyone. Messengers were the secondary tool. Today messengers start to play the first role. But no work messengers were built for remote or hybrid work.
Task management. With the emergence of remote work, it’s become much harder for teams to manage their work and tasks. Task trackers are supposed to help with it, but they don’t do it fully. Their main problem from day one is that they are not sticky at all, and only a small part of employees really loved to use them. No matter what task tracker the team uses, most of the time it’s much deadlier than alive: data and statuses there are not actual, deadlines are outdated, and teammates don’t use it on a daily basis.
As a result, teams have problems with their workflows
- Spam. Work messengers are constantly overwhelmed and flooded with messages that aren’t relevant to you.
- Data losses. Losing important information in messengers is easy due to the high message volume, especially when working with teammates across different time zones.
- Monkey job. Team communication in messengers is often disconnected from task management in task trackers, leading to data moving back and forth between tools.
- No place for topic-based communication. Team members lack a dedicated place for communication on specific tasks and are forced to use task-tracker comments, creating additional work overheads.
It all leads to constant team distractions, anxiety, and burnout.
Modern teams need a tool to streamline their communication and workflows
- Messaging-first. Communication is the core of every collaboration and messengers are the most sticky work tool, so the main work interface should be organized around communication.
- Topic-based communication. Any messages and discussions should be based on certain tasks and work people doing. It also should be directed to whom it is intended, without distractions for other teammates.
- One place for communication, tasks, and data. The tasks and goals a team is working on should be deeply connected with team communication and data to prevent context switching, and data loss, and give fast access to the whole history of tasks or decisions that were made.
Those are the core ideas we are building Orchestra on.
We believe that modern teams deserve modern, fast, and handy tools built to give them a new much calmer, more efficient, and streamlined work experience, free from the limitations of outdated collaboration tools with clunky API integrations.
We invite all teams to try out Orchestra and experience how better collaboration can be. Get in https://orch.so